<p>Most of the people in the pictures seemed amenable to being photographed. Or they pretended to be.</p><p>Motionless for minutes, they stared vacantly at their camera-wielding predators, likely unaware the images would be used to justify <a class="Link" href="https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/digital-archives-teaching-indian-colonial-history-through-photographs-teaching-resource-essay/" target="_blank" >colonial subjugation</a> and spread imperial propaganda.</p><p>Some wary Indians <a class="Link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/19/british-empire-photography-to-control-india-colonialism" target="_blank" >rebelled</a> by refusing to pose as instructed, showing up late or skipping entirely the mid-19th and early 20th century photo sessions orchestrated by the British.</p><p>But even some maharajas donning diamond-encrusted turbans were as powerless as the dhoti- and sari-clad working class to fully subvert the <a class="Link" href="https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colonial-views-of-india-impey-photographs" target="_blank" >patronizing Western gaze</a>. </p><div class="RichTextSidebarModule Enhancement" data-module data-align-center><a class="AnchorLink" id="module-570000" name="module-570000"></a> <div class="RichTextSidebarModule-title">Columnists bug</div> <div class="RichTextModule-items RichTextBody"><h2>Columnists</h2><br><i>In-depth political coverage, sports analysis, entertainment reviews and cultural commentary.</i><br></div> </div><p>To give these long-gone photo subjects the agency they were denied, Pakistan-born visual artist <a class="Link" href="https://www.lalikhalid.com/" target="_blank" >Mehreen “Lali” Khalid</a> turned the camera on herself as a form of collective retribution.</p><p>Serving as a "surrogate," Khalid "reclaimed consent and control" by using the same albumen glass plate and silver gelatin print photographic processes that reduced countless pre-Partition South Asians to one-dimensional, "exoticized" specimens.</p><p>The defiant self-portraits, which Khalid snapped in January on the same walk she took for 12 days by the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, are now on <a class="Link" href="https://www.mocp.org/events/diane-dammeyer-fellowship-exhibition-lali-khalid/" target="_blank" >display</a> at Columbia College Chicago’s Glass Curtain Gallery, 1104 S.